risk
'I've always been excited by innovation. I place creativity high on my list of aspirations and priorities in my own business, and I think my life gets most interesting when I'm involved with people who are similarly attuned to this desire to do and try new and interesting things.' That's how Brian Van Bower opened his
VacCare (Simi Valley, CA) produces the Model AR300 automatic air-relief safety valve for use in…
In approaching big jobs with challenging access issues, sometimes you get lucky and can figure out an excavation solution that doesn’t involve the one we had no choice but to use in the project shown in this video. In other entries in this series, I’ve shown how to get the digging done with mini-Bobcats, conveyor systems and big disposal chutes. This time, we had a situation in which none of those options
My feelings about diving boards and slides have changed through the years. When I was a kid, there was no poolside sight more welcoming than either one of those accessories. The clowning that took place on and around diving boards was, for starters, unmatched in hilarity, and there was nothing quite so satisfying as
Almost every advertisement for watershapes I’ve ever seen in a newspaper or the Yellow Pages says something about “custom” this or “custom” that. It always leads me to wonder how to differentiate between the “custom,” “high-end” and “luxury” pools others devise and the “architectural pools” or, better yet, the “aquatic art” I strive to create. I prefer the last two terms because
These days, it seems natural for people to be reluctant to take risks. We are, after all, still feeling the effects of a severe recession, and lots of folks are hunkered down, saving their pennies and waiting for something good to happen. I completely understand this conservative impulse, especially on the business front, but it’s also obvious to me that if we’re going to take the necessary steps to return to more prosperous times, then we as individuals, as an industry and even as a society will at some point need to start
If you ask my employees and manage to get an unguarded response, they’ll tell you that I’m an unrelenting pain in the neck – a real tyrant. That’s because I’m always asking nagging sorts of questions such as, “Why isn’t this project finished yet?” or “How much longer is this going to take?” or “Can you speed things up?” My point in asking, of course, is to let them know on some level that if I were on site and was responsible for what was happening, we’d already be
Lots of us landshapers hear voices. The longer we're around, the clearer those voices become and the more we trust them. "Don't take this job," they'll say. "You can't make this look good. Do you really want to be known for this project?" For the most part, these internal voices perform a valuable service in keeping us out of harm's way. Every once in a while, however, I find myself
For years, conventional wisdom has held that many of the advances in watershape design incubate in the commercial realm and then slowly percolate over to the residential market as our clients ask for features they've seen on vacation and elsewhere. That paradigm holds up to this day in many ways, but what's less acknowledged and, I believe, more prevalent in today's market is an opposite trend in which commercial clients are requesting details that are more closely associated with residential pools. In fact, it's my observation that the
